William-Henry Ireland only nineteen perpetrated the greatest Shakespear forgery ever attempted. Find out how he managed to fool so many people with these fakes and the motivation for creating these forgeries. William-Henry Ireland only nineteen perpetrated the greatest Shakespeare forgery ever attempted. As a result his father was personally destroyed in a tale worthy of a Greek tragedy when William driven by a simple yearning for his father s love inverted his father s great passion for Shakespeare to impale him on the great Shakespeare fraud. This tragicomedy drew in everyone from the Prince of Wales to the queen of the stage Mrs Siddons from the great scholar Edmund Malone to James Boswell from Dr Johnson to the Duke of Clarence from perhaps the most famous playwright of his day Richard Brinsley Sheridan who staged the supposed new play by Shakespeare s hand to H.J. Pye the Poet Laureate. closely interrogated and the ensuing furore when the documents were finally discovered to be forgeries became a national scandal. His father alone refused to believe that his simpleton son was capable of such duplicity remaining convinced that the forgeries were genuine.